THE FINEST HOURS (Craig Gillespie). 117 minutes. Opens Friday (January 29). See listings. Rating: NN
The Finest Hours dramatizes the true story of a dangerous Coast Guard rescue operation in February 1952, when four sailors took a small boat out into the furious Atlantic to find some 30-odd men stranded on a demolished oil tanker.
The narrative is pretty simple: the men on the tanker (among them Casey Affleck, John Ortiz and Abraham Benrubi) must stay alive until the Coast Guard can reach them, and the rescue team (led by Chris Pine and Ben Foster) must brave gale-force winds and perilous seas just to clear the harbour and start the search.
Working in full Ron Howard mode, director Craig Gillespie (Lars And The Real Girl) pours on the portent in the film’s first half, reminding us of risk and danger at every turn. And the actors respond with no-nonsense performances, which is what the material requires.
But once the mission is actually under way, The Finest Hours plunges full-on into wall-to-wall CG, the digital effects dwarfing the human heroics in a mess of blurry, choppy images. And the attempts to anchor the drama in a love story between Pine’s Bernie Webber and his fiancée Miriam just feel like a way of finding things for Holliday Grainger to do on shore.
